Physical Wellness

Sharjah Woman Suffers Traumatic Experience Receiving False HIV Diagnosis

By Jenn Loro | Update Date: Jan 13, 2016 10:36 AM EST

A Pakistani expatriate and expectant mother suffered tremendous amount of emotional torment just days before her delivery after being told that she was HIV positive by a private hospital in Dubai.

The wrong diagnosis prompted the husband to raise a formal complaint against the hospital for giving his wife unwanted stress and psychological torture prior to giving birth.

Twenty-nine year-old Khizra Afreen Farhad, a resident of Sharjah, went to GMC hospital for her routine medical tests while counting the few remaining days before giving birth to a second child with her husband, Farhad Nasim, also a migrant worker from Pakistan.

She was extremely shocked when results of the laboratory tests revealed an HIV positive diagnosis.

"I was told that I was HIV positive and had to have a Caesarean to have my baby. I ran to the bathroom and started crying, I was afraid to give my mother the bad news.

Last year, my dad passed away and my mother is old and can't take a shock like this, so we hid this from her," said Afreen as quoted by The National.

She recalled the traumatic experience at that time like being handed down a death sentence despite attempts by the doctor to pacify her according to Albawaba.

The husband was equally stunned and anxious after receiving the news from the hospital. He was later advised to accompany his wife for a mandatory second test by the Ministry of Health infectious disease laboratory.

Test result from the ministry laboratory returned with negative HIV diagnosis which the couple promptly forwarded to hospital. Afreen proceeded to giving birth through normal delivery.

"Those two days were hell. My wife would not even touch our elder son. We expected the hospital to apologize to us for causing us so much trauma... The stress triggered a lot of bleeding on the day of the delivery," recalled Farhad as mentioned by Gulf News.

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